Chapter One hundred eighty-five (Patreon)

The last time Kaz looked at his core, he’d seen marked improvement, even over how it looked when Nucai first repaired it. Now, it was even better, and he could see that both his blue and his gold ki were stronger than before he interacted with the Tree, or rather the beings or spirits inside it. His Wood ki, especially, blazed with a brilliant sapphire light, and spun easily out of his core, flowing into his channels. While the red, white, and black ki hadn’t really strengthened, they, too, simply seemed more saturated than before.

That explained why he was recovering so quickly, and why he just felt stronger than he ‘should’ in general. When he looked closely, he could see that there were still lingering traces of black - a different, dirty, kind of black than the pure dark glow of Water ki - in his skin, ears, nose, and lungs. Basically, anywhere that had been directly exposed to the fluids within the shiyan still had some healing to do, but his eyes were by far the worst.

Dismissing the rest of his body for the moment, Kaz ‘looked’ at his eyes - and it was a very strange experience to see something he literally looked out of every moment of the rest of his life. Perhaps that was why they were noticeably less saturated with ki than most of the rest of his body. He didn’t see them, and therefore they had been forgotten.

It seemed like most of his body glowed with power to some extent, with those areas he had consciously focused on being the brightest of all. His lungs were filled with the lambent white of metal ki, while his heart pounded with ruby fire. His eyes, on the other hand, had only the faintest sheen of blue, and he thought much of that was from his recent efforts at healing them. More important, however, was the thick haze of blackness that hung inside them, the darkest part of it concentrated at the back.

Kaz hung in the emptiness of that place between reality and power, and stared at that grimy gray fog. It felt almost sticky, as if it wanted to cling there, and he thought that if he allowed it to remain for too long, it might settle in and become permanent.

But where could he send that invading darkness? The rest of it could be expelled out of the orifices through which it had entered, or simply ooze out of his skin, which would be unpleasant and disgusting, but leave him cleansed.

The eyes had no such openings, however, and he didn’t want them to burst with escaping dark humors, if that was even a thing that could happen. Could he open just a very small hole, one which would allow the filth out, and he could heal the self-inflicted wound immediately after? He cringed at the thought, but he had to consider it as a possible solution.

<Idiot!> Li’s familiar chastisement broke through his concentration, nearly jolting him back to normal awareness. <Just imagine,> she told him, and distantly, he felt her tuck her head into the palm of his hand. That head had real weight now, occupying most of his palm and nearly disrupting the connection between his thumb and fingers.

Lianhua’s face appeared in his mind, saying, “What a cultivator can create is shaped by their image. Their understanding of what they’re trying to do. I can’t be certain, but I suspect that your image of light is linked to fire, and that’s probably true of female kobolds, as well, since their lights also tend to flicker. I’ve seen a surprising number of bioluminescent plants since we entered the mountain, but the light they give off is relatively faint. So, when you imagined light, even though you were copying me, your understanding of how light is created came from your own experience.”

<Know that it will work, and it will,> Li said. <That’s why dragons are so powerful. We always know we’ll succeed.>

Was it really as simple as having more confidence? Somehow, Kaz doubted it, or Gaoda would have been the most powerful being in the mountain. There was some essential truth there, however, something that his literal mind struggled with, so instead he turned to something he had only recently rediscovered; his artistic side.

Slowly, he pushed away his understanding of the structure of an actual eye. He had certainly dealt with enough of them during his time as a gatherer, especially after he grew large enough to join the few remaining males when they hunted. That visceral knowledge wouldn’t help him right now, though, so instead he thought about the experience of seeing.

Light, images, entered the eye somehow. How that worked, he had no idea, but whimsically, he drew a tiny picture of Li onto the interior surface of a great, round white globe. He tilted his head, and the dragon turned sideways, nearly tumbling down the curved surface on which she was painted, until she dug her claws in and turned to glare at him.

A tiny pang went through his left eye, and he resisted the urge to rub it, instead dismissing the image of Li and creating one of a rougu mushroom, one of his favorites, whose bright green gills were stark and clear in his memory. He moved around it, allowing his shadow to cover it at some points, and not at others.

Yes, he definitely understood that light had to travel into the eye. When that light was blocked, the image faded and grew dark. Where something could enter, something else could exit. This was truth.

Turning back to his core, he saw that it was already spinning faster, as if anticipating that it would soon be needed. His central dantian was far from full, but it contained a good amount of ki, and there was nearly as much blue as any of the other colors except for gold.

He compressed his ki, holding it tight as it tried to escape. Forcing it into a smaller and smaller space, he saw that the coruscation of power that had surrounded the core was now confined to its surface. He pressed harder, tighter, feeling something build inside him until it was almost painful. When he released it, he would need to control it very carefully in order to prevent it from being wasted or damaging his channels again.

A small clawed paw stretched out, hovering over the image of his core, and he felt Li’s assistance, using her own ki to push back against his, which was a very strange sensation, since usually her ki and his were all but the same thing.

The pressure built, and he could feel his mouth open as he began to pant. His heart began to stutter in his chest, in spite of the amount of ki it held. That ki didn’t drain away, and it didn’t fade, but instead of being part of a fully integrated system, it seemed as if each of his organs was trying to function on its own, and failing.

Kaz and Li released their hold at the same moment, in the same breath, and ki flooded Kaz’s tissues and channels, filling him until he thought he would explode with it. It was incredibly difficult to prevent the colors from splitting, traveling to the parts of his body that cried out for each one. Instead, he gave his organs only what they needed to return to being a functional whole, then pushed the rest of the excess into the places where that miasma still lingered.

He pushed, and again, he felt Li there with him, using her greater ability at ki manipulation to help him. He thought he was still a little stronger than the dragon, probably thanks to her delayed growth, but there was no doubt that she was better at the fine detail of what they needed to do.

He felt her delight in his admiration, and she focused even closer, delicately picking at the places where the contamination clung, and when the strands snapped like zhiwu web, fresh, pure ki was pushed into the gap left behind.

Something shifted inside him. Some balance had been overturned, altered, and a new equilibrium formed. His heart settled into a steady beat, slower and yet stronger than it had ever been before. Every part of him seemed lit from within, and bright sparks shone at each place where the blackness had been severed.

Kaz coughed. Something was rising in his throat, and he spasmed, coughing and vomiting with equal fervor. He heard the scrape of claws on stone as Li scrambled out of the way, and he hacked up a glob of stinking black bile, sticky and repulsive.

Sadly, that was far from the end of it, and soon he was even more disgusting and foul than he had been when they arrived. At least the ichor of the shiyan had had time to dry and flake off, but this was wet and clung to him, as reluctant to leave as he was desperate to have it gone.

“Pellis’ cursed feces, Blue,” Raff said, sounding like he was standing right beside Kaz, shouting into his sensitive ears. “Are you all right? Is this what you meant? ‘Cause you don’t look or smell human right now, unless that human has been dead for a week.”

“He’s refining his body,” Lianhua’s voice said, louder than Kaz had ever heard it before. She sounded awed, and he could sense her stepping closer, the force of her ki pushing against Kaz’s. Fortunately, she wasn’t cultivating at the moment, because he wasn’t sure what would happen if she did while his own ki was fighting so hard to burst out of him. She might break his grip on it, and find herself flooded with more ki than she was ready for, which would probably injured both of them, possibly badly. He would have to warn her to stay away from him if he ever did this again in the future. Frankly, he doubted he would, because he was not enjoying the process at all.

Kaz thrashed like a larval woshi pulled from its pool, even more revolting goo making its way from his body. Thankfully, his understanding of his eyes as having openings in and out seemed to be working, and though he couldn’t see through the sticky film over them, he also didn’t feel like they were going to burst. The process was uncomfortable, but it seemed like everything about having ki was uncomfortable at some point, so that was nothing new.

He tried to speak as Lianhua moved even closer, probably in an attempt to help him. It felt like her ki was a physical thing, a moving wall that shoved at him. He wriggled, and with a yelp, fell into the water.

He sank. There was none of his usual awkward competence, and he couldn’t even thrash properly as his snout sank beneath the surface. The water was deep, and it pushed and pulled at him even harder than Lianhua’s ki. Fortunately, his lungs had become so efficient that he felt no particular need to breathe, but he did feel distant concern as something seemed to grab him and pull him along after it.

It wasn’t a beast, at least not so far as he could tell. No tentacle dragged on his ankle, no pincers tightened on his waist, instead it was like the water itself was alive. It played with him, tossing him from one side to the other, spinning and swirling until he had no idea which way was up except that his link to Li led ‘that way’, and he knew she wasn’t in the water with him.

He struck something, hard, and the first real pang of concern broke through the hazy sense of relief that the worst of his expulsion of the corruption seemed to be done. At least the need to cough and gag seemed to have vanished along with the urge to take a breath.

An image pressed into his mind, driven by Li’s fear. A pale blue body sloshed and churned through a widening body of water, becoming something that he could no longer deny was a river. Not a river like the slow, placid flows that sometimes formed in areas where no kobolds had lived for several generations, but a wide, wild abundance that sang with black ki. That ki reached out, lifting and turning him, and he began to feel a sense of something more than random power behind it. A sense of intelligence, of self that no water should have.

It touched him, swept him away, and his connection to Li stretched into tenuous eternity. The power couldn’t quite separate them, take Kaz for its own, but it did steal away his body, which vanished into the shadows beneath the waves.